set up homesteads in Wassulu and in Siguiri’s Liberty Village. The presence of children could have influenced the outcome of the tribunal, but there were no details concerning paternity in the account.
Ciraïa Aminata’s ability to determine her possible future was circumscribed by the colonial state’s narrow vision of emancipated women’s destiny as wives. Gallieni claimed that Ciraïa Aminata’s status as a resident of Siguiri’s Liberty Village gave her the freedom to choose her husband from among the three successive masters/husbands. By framing her act as one of choice, Gallieni perpetuated the myth that West African women obtained liberties through the emancipatory processes on offer in Liberty Villages, when, in fact, Ciraïa Aminata’s only “choice” was marriage. Ciraïa Aminata “chose” the tirailleur sénégalais who was her first abductor/ravisher and first husband. She elected to become a madame tirailleur as opposed to the wife of a civilian. Upon leaving the tribunal with Ciraïa Aminata, her tirailleur sénégalais husband purportedly commented, “women always prefer handsome tirailleurs sénégalais to civilians.”68 Captured for posterity in Gallieni’s Deux campagnes, the words of a gloating braggart signal several assumptions made by colonial soldiers and their commanders: martiality, affiliation with the colonial state’s authority, and access to its resources made African colonial soldiers ideal spouses. For Gallieni, the affair of Ciraïa Aminata was an allegory for the “benevolent” power of military colonization.
There are other reasons that may explain why Ciraïa Aminata chose the tirailleur sénégalais over the other men. The possibility of economic and social stability would have been appealing to her, having recently experienced a rapid succession of life-altering events and intimate affiliations. She may have recognized that the tirailleur sénégalais’s gainful employment held more promise than the other men, who were refugees in an increasingly crowded Liberty Village. Marriage to a tirailleur sénégalais could safeguard against future reenslavement because the colonial military protected soldiers and their conjugal partners from former and potential future masters. Ciraïa Aminata may have also been aware of the fact that Gallieni donated domesticated animals and grains to new military households. Membership in an African military household made mesdames tirailleurs eligible for regular rations and gave them preferential access to land.69 Ciraïa Aminata’s choice of husband corresponds with the historical arguments regarding the “strategies of slaves and women” in politically tumultuous regions. Marriage to important men or colonial employees was an avenue through which women could reduce their vulnerability to reenslavement or forced conjugal association.70 However, marriages between West African women and tirailleurs sénégalais were not simply the result of a cost-benefit analysis on the part of vulnerable women. Physical and emotional attraction certainly influenced how women maneuvered through the postslavery landscape of militarism and colonialism. Remarkably, Ciraïa Aminata chose a husband that Gallieni had labeled an abductor and a sexual assailant. Her “choice” may indicate that Gallieni misunderstood that day near the stream in Baté. If Ciraïa Aminata was a slave when she was collecting water near the Milo River, she could not marry without the authority of her master.71 The task of gathering water would have given her brief reprieve from the mindful and authoritative eyes of her master and his household. In those precious unescorted moments, she may have absconded with her abductor—who could have been her liberator and lover. Abduction, or perhaps elopement in this case, would have been a means for two people of low social status to circumvent normative marital practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African societies.72
Gallieni portrayed Ciraïa Aminata as a woman capable of making choices within the constraints of war, colonization, and emancipation. He used her story to illustrate the success of the tirailleurs sénégalais and Liberty Villages as colonial institutions that facilitated processes of slave emancipation and postconflict social stability. Yet Ciraïa Aminata’s experience at the Siguiri tribunal was exceptional when compared with other women who became mesdames tirailleurs in nineteenth-century West Africa. Historical evidence suggests that West African women partnering with tirailleurs sénégalais “had little choice” in the matter and that freed slave women needed the protection of colonial soldiers because they “would be enslaved again by the first man who came along.”73 However, Ciraïa Aminata broadens our understanding of the complex processes that preceded mesdames tirailleurs’ partnerships with colonial soldiers. Love and emotional investment are difficult to historicize in the gendered silences of the nineteenth-century French colonial historical record. However, the absence of evidence portraying emotional attachment does not eliminate it as a motivating factor for women to join African military households.74 These households became part of a tirailleurs sénégalais military community that cultivated its own marital traditions where West African and colonial societies overlapped.
MEMBERS ONLY: EXPLORING FAMILY LIFE IN TIRAILLEURS’ MILITARY COMMUNITIES
Someone sent them reinforcements: ten tirailleurs flanked by their families, wives, children, captives, monkeys, cats, chickens, parakeets, each dragging behind him Noah’s Ark.
—Paul Vigné d’Octon, Journal d’un marin75
A curious spectacle to some, tirailleurs sénégalais households became a common feature of the French West African military landscape at the end of the nineteenth century.76 Mesdames tirailleurs lived as wives and military auxiliaries in the violent swirl of French colonial conquest. From the 1880s, household migration was an important feature of colonial soldiers’ conjugal traditions. Once in the French military community, mesdames tirailleurs and tirailleurs sénégalais adjusted their domestic responsibilities to the daily rhythms of camp life and military campaign. The military promoted its own hierarchical organization, but it did not replace West African social organization—caste, slave ancestry, ethnicity—with meritocracy. West African military households conformed their traditions of familial reciprocity and patron-client relationships to the ranks and divisions of the colonial military. The French colonial military became an extended family, or kinship network, that provided newlyweds with basic resources and social security. African military households depended on each other and created fictive kin relationships within their regiments. The military allocated resources to them, which fueled these relationships and made these households reliant on the colonial state. Unlike French soldiers serving in the army, tirailleurs sénégalais brought wives and children with them on campaign and in their frequent garrison changes.77 These practices untethered tirailleurs sénégalais households from specific geographies, communities, and familial kin, while strengthening their ties to the French colonial military.
Above, I highlighted how civilian women became soldiers’ wives through conflict and emancipation. Civilian women living near tirailleurs sénégalais encampments were also incorporated into the military community without the violence affiliated with war. The French colonial military did not enforce boundaries between soldiers and civilians. Sometimes, with little formality, civilian women became soldiers’ wives. West African campaigns depended on the continual incorporation of civilians into the military community. Campaigning regiments relied on local villages to provide spaces for bivouacking and basic foodstuffs. Villages supplied female laborers, often enslaved women, to perform domestic tasks for campaigning soldiers that ranged from pounding millet to sexual services.78 Military encampments constructed near urban centers were busy sites of commerce and exchange. Local female and male merchants found ready consumers for basic and luxury goods among tirailleurs sénégalais households. Military encampments were also sites of civilian labor recruitment. French officers and West African infantrymen hired women and men to supply their regiments as they crossed West Africa.79 Market women and hired women’s protracted presence in tirailleurs sénégalais’ encampments could make them members of the African military community and/or specific households.
Mesdames tirailleurs acutely experienced the structural transformation of West African households in the colonial military. These women followed regiments with the disassembled components of their homesteads and their husbands’ effects (excluding rifles and bullets) loaded on their heads, while bearing young children on their
